1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to systems, methods, and computer program products for managing and navigating large-scale information spaces, and more particularly, systems, methods, and computer program products for managing and navigating digital libraries.
2. Discussion of the Background
The “Principle of Least Effort” stands for the notion that when a user is confronted with an information system, the tendency is for the user to be satisfied with the information that can be easily found, as opposed to better information that would require more effort on the user's part to locate. The concept of the Principle of Least Effort is discussed at length in Chapter 8 of Mann, “Library Research Models: A Guide to Classification, Cataloging, and Computers,” Oxford University Press, 1993, the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. It is a primary objective of library professionals to design systems that can provide users with the highest quality information available and in a minimum amount of time and/or effort.
With the popularization of the Internet, the amount of information that has become available has become so large that it is not practical for users to search and assess the quality of all the information that is now available to them. While more information typically is beneficial, many professions have become hamstrung by an overabundance of information of variable quality readily available to them. One such example is the healthcare industry. Health insurance organizations, such as health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and planned provider organizations (PPOs) have placed restrictions on doctors that severely limits the amount of time that a doctor can spend on any given patient. One problem that this has presented to physicians is that the amount of time that they can spend researching a patient's condition has been severely limited.
The Internet has provided healthcare professionals a mechanism through which the most recent medical and research information can be accessed. However, given the amount of information that is available, and the severe limits on the physician's time available for research, it is impossible for the doctors to spend the time required to assess the quality of the information available to them. Therefore, it is not uncommon for doctors to rely on a limited, albeit trusted, set of information. One impact of this problem is that doctors are not being kept current on new developments in the medical field. Another impact of this problem is that patients may not be receiving the best care available since their physicians may not be aware of the most recent developments relating to a patient's condition.
In an effort to address these problems in the medical field, organizations have begun to develop large repositories of medical information that can be distributed to physicians. These organizations can then provide a service of sorting through new information as it becomes available, assess the quality of the information, and providing what they believe to be the best information available to their clients. This. model for addressing the problem can provide a large number of physicians with access to a common repository of quality information. This approach is a step in the right direction, but it is not without its problems. For example, it is to be expected that different physicians and different clinics will want access to different information. Physicians and clinics oftentimes provide specialized services, and accordingly, demand different levels of information for different specialties. Furthermore, aside from the medical specialities, it is not uncommon for physicians in different locations to want different levels of information for different medical conditions. For example, clinics located in urban areas are likely to see patients that have different conditions than those patients seen at a rural clinic.
Accordingly, it can be seen that conventional methods for providing access to large-scale information spaces are inadequate. In many cases, there is simply too much information available for the users to make sense of. In other cases, while the amount of information is manageable, the users have sacrificed their ability to control the content of information that they have access to. It is not practical to provide an information space that provides all content for all potential users. It would be advantageous to users of information if an approach were developed that allowed localized managers, such as local librarians, to provide their users with access to the content that was of most interest to their particular user population. The library professionals would become managers of links to content, rather than managers of the content itself. Such an approach would empower the library and information system professionals to collaboratively develop links to the best information that best meets the needs of their particular user population.
The librarians, or other managers of information, would be able to focus on gaining and organizing access to the content their users desire, and not be concerned with the overwhelming task of developing a library of the content itself. It would be advantageous if the librarians, through collaboration, could focus on navigation and access to content of interest, rather than the daunting task of creating their own content collection. Advantages to users of information will be provided by helping them to quickly navigate to the highest quality information of most interest to them. Through collaboration, the managers of the information will be able to tailor the navigation to their particular users' needs. The need for navigation tools to leverage the amount of information available over the Internet, for example, was discussed in Wurster, T., “Getting Real About Virtual Commerce,” Harvard Business Review, President and Fellows of Harvard College, November 1999/December 1999, the entire contents of which is incorporated herein by reference.
As managers of large-scale information spaces, librarians would benefit from being able to track how their users are accessing the information. For example, it would be advantageous if a digital librarian could track the traversal path of users through a digital library so that those paths could be optimized based on historical usage patterns. It has been recognized that conventional server logs are very error prone, and therefore do not serve as a reliable source for such usage information. In particular, the inconsistent level of information maintained by conventional browsers and the caching levels of those browsers can lead to the creation of incomplete or inaccurate server logs. The difficulties presented in gathering reliable log information are discussed in detail in Fieber, J., “Browser Caching and Web Log Analysis,” 1999 Mid-Year Meeting, American Society for Information Science, May 24-26, 1999, the entire contents of which is incorporated herein by reference. Therefore, conventional server logs have not provided a reliable source of usage information for librarians.
The challenge, then, as presently recognized, is to develop an approach and tools for library and information system professionals to provide navigation aids and access to a manageable amount of information that has been assessed for quality, and which is easily tailored to meet the needs of specialized groups of users. It would be advantageous if such a system were dynamic, meaning that the information available to the users of the system was constantly updated and arranged to facilitate navigation for the users of the information. It would be further advantageous if a feedback mechanism were provided that maintained accurate usage information on the users for the library professionals and other managers of information and enabled users to explicitly register their satisfaction with the real-world outcome of using the provided information (e.g., relevance rating, etc.).